Over the past few years, tech hubs have sprung up in cities across the globe, making it possible to start a high-growth company from almost anywhere, not just London or Silicon Valley. Tech hubs help make that happen—providing desks for entrepreneurs who are chasing their dreams, mentorship and educational opportunities for talented developers, and a vibrant community for innovative startups.

We started Google for Entrepreneurs to help foster entrepreneurship in communities around the world. Through our work in more than 100 countries, we’ve been incredibly impressed with the catalyzing impact that tech hubs have had: helping startups grow, and creating jobs in local communities in the process. So today we’re announcing a Tech Hub Network with seven partners, initially located in North America. 1871 (Chicago), American Underground (Durham), Coco (Minneapolis), Communitech (Waterloo), Galvanize (Denver), Grand Circus (Detroit) and Nashville Entrepreneur Center (Nashville) are all top notch spaces fueling entrepreneurship. We believe these hubs have pioneered a new approach to launching a business, and it’s our mission to help support them.

We’re partnering to create a strong network, providing each hub with financial support alongside access to Google technology, platforms and mentors, and ensuring that entrepreneurs at these hubs have access to an even larger network of startups. We’re excited to exchange ideas and connect hubs with each other and with Google to have an even bigger economic impact on local communities.

Do you have an idea to change the world? That’s what Google asked the 2013 Google Science Fair participants back in January, and students ages 13-18 from around the world met our challenge. Last night, the finalists—representing eight different countries—gathered at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. and presented their projects to a panel of esteemed judges. Attendees of the Fair and judges alike were wowed by the finalists’ passion for science and their drive to change the world.

Ann Makosinski from Canada designed a flashlight which using Peltier tiles and the temperature difference between the palm of the hand and ambient air, and provides bright light without batteries or moving parts.

Ann's design was one of top 15 projects were selected from thousands of entries submitted by talented young scientists from more than 120 countries around the world. These projects were impressive and represented a vast range of scientific ingenuity—from a multi-step system created for early diagnosis of melanoma cancers to the invention of a metallic exoskeleton glove that assists, supports and enhances the movement of the human palm to help people who suffer from upper hand disabilities.

We're pleased to present this guest post from AUX Channel Producer, Sam Sutherland as we count down to the Polaris Music Prize gala being broadcast on YouTube for the first time.

Polaris Music Prize gala is now in its eighth year – modeled after similarly righteous prizes like the U.K.’s Mercury Prize, it recognizes the best Canadian album of the past 12 months as voted by a jury of super cool and smart and handsome journalists and media types. (Of which I am a biased part.)

“Selected solely on artistic merit without regard to genre, sales history or label affiliation,” Polaris has built a reputation of credibility and risk – past winners range from Sesame Street-approved Feist to spacey francophones Karkwa, plus perennial treasures Arcade Fire and Caribou.

Its annual gala, where the 10 shortlisted nominees perform before a winner is crowned and the requisite $30,000 giant novelty cheque is handed out, is consistently one of the most exciting concerts of the year; every September it brings together the best our country has to offer. Literally.

This is the first year that AUX (the super cool and smart and handsome place that I work as a producer) will be Polaris’ media partner. For the uninitiated, AUX is a Canadian broadcast channel, an award-winning digital magazine, a pretty sweet website, and a growing YouTube channel. The latter is where we will be broadcasting the 8th annual Polaris Music Prize Gala on September 23 starting at 7:00 p.m. EST.

In the past, Polaris was produced like a television show, for television. But since securing our Polaris partnership/pals status officially this spring, our approach to the Prize has been focused on building content around the event and the music it celebrates in the place we all go to find it – on YouTube. We’ve been traveling across North America all summer doing interviews and producing mini documentaries on each of the short-listed artists. They’re fun. You should watch them, like this one here: How Tegan and Sara wrote "Closer"

AUX’s approach has been to mimic Polaris’, which is why our stream on YouTube will be available everywhere in the world, fully embeddable, rewind-able, and immediately online for fresh viewing after the winner is announced. All for the first time in
Polaris history.

We aren’t just broadcasting the show, either – AUX will give viewers a chance to engage with artists, jury members, and past winners through multiple social platforms in our simultaneous backstage stream, just one click away from the big room and full-scale performances and baked into a single YouTube stream. It’s a way of ensuring that something exciting is always happening for fans at home, whether they’re waiting for a stage changeover to wrap or their favourite artist to make an appearance.

We’re excited – sleeplessly, ulcer-inducingly excited – about being a part of the Polaris Music Prize and the new ways to open the evening up to anyone with an internet connection and interest in Canadian music.

Attention Toronto non-profits! Google Toronto is excited to announce our fall round of Community Grants to support organizations working on projects that support science & tech education, internet adoption, online safety or greening our communities.

The application for community grants is currently open with an application deadline of October 1st.
Google community grants are intended for nonprofit and certain public organizations, and if your organizations has projects underway in these areas – or the ones listed below – you can apply for a Google Grant here.

Improving capacity for nonprofits, schools or small businesses through building technology and web infrastructure (i.e. cloud computing, online search, hardware);

Online safety and privacy;

Reducing carbon footprint/green initiatives; or

Increasing access to high-speed Internet.

We invite organizations, projects or individuals that fit these guidelines to register and submit their proposal through our online application by 11:59PM on October 1st, 2013.

When evaluating proposals, impact matters most. We’re looking for projects with a measurable impact in the community, where Google’s in-kind or volunteer resources may help maximize the impact, as well as your organization’s track record on related programs.

If you believe you have a project or program that fits these guidelines, please submit your proposal today!Posted by Jeff Lui & Azadeh Attar, Google Canada

We're pleased to present this guest post from The Next 36's Jon French in advance of this weekend's hackathon in Toronto and Waterloo... read on!
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The intriguing world of wearable tech will be on display at Google in Toronto and Waterloo this weekend in what will be one of the Canada’s first wearable computing hackathons.

Google Canada will host the 18-hour dual-venue event on behalf of The Next 36, a program for Canada’s top undergraduate entrepreneurs. To no surprise, (given the buzz around wearable tech devices like Google Glass) the hack sold out in just 2 weeks, attracting over 140 eager student devs to spend Friday night and Saturday building software for hardware on some of the most cutting-edge technology out there. Devices which are, for the most part, still unavailable on the market today.

The hackathon is the first featuring the Myo, a gesture-controlled armband from Waterloo’s Thalmic Labs set for release in 2014. Two Next 36 Alumni are spearheading Thalmic’s involvement – Stephen Lake (Co-founder) and Scott Greenberg (Director of Developer Relations). "I'm really looking forward to getting early Myo units into the hands of developers at The Next 36 Hackathon,” says Lake. “For the first time, developers outside of Thalmic Labs will be interacting with Myo, and we can't wait to see what they come up with."

In addition to the Myo, hackers will have an opportunity to build applications for the Pebble smartwatch and the Kiwi motion sensor device.

Backed by Shopify and Communitech as well, the hack has garnered an impressive panel of judges, including leading developers, engineers and managers from Thalmic Labs, Google, Shopify, BNOTIONS, Oikoi and Bitmaker Labs.
Hackers will be judged on a matrix of their app’s concept, the quality of the “hack product” and functioning demo. The top 3 teams in each location will walk away with a slew of prizes including a team set of Myos, pebble smartwatches and advance spots at The Next 36 National Selection Weekend in late November.

Stay tuned for results and hack highlights! Posted by Jon French, Director of Marketing & Events, The Next 36

Last week all across Canada, students started a new school year. Educators everywhere have been getting ready for that first bell to ring and for classrooms to fill up. In the spirit of kicking off a new year, we talked with teachers in several provinces who are empowering their students with Chromebooks and Google Apps. We discovered some really inspiring work going on, so we’re sharing a few of our favorite stories here with you.

Photo credit: Edmonton Public Schools

Grade four students Gabriel and Emily in Edmonton work with their Teacher David Salmon on their student portfolio sites using Chromebooks.

Bill MacKenzie is an Information Communication Technology Consultant for the Upper Grand District School Board just outside Toronto. He first introduced Chromebooks and Google Apps to the district’s 34,000 students two years ago. In deciding between platforms, MacKenzie noted, “What’s different about Google is the collaborative piece. More than one student can work on a project at the same time and share their work with others in the classroom or across the globe. That’s an absolute game changer for us.” Currently, 4,000 shared Chromebooks are deployed throughout the district’s elementary, secondary, and high schools.

IT Director Philippe Lemieux was equally excited about bringing Google Apps and Chromebooks to his French-language public school district in Canada. This fall, all 13,000 students and 38 schools in the Eastern Ontario French Public School Board will be using Google Apps, and over 3,000 Chromebooks will be deployed across the wide-spread school board. While Lemieux was blown away by the potential in Google’s collaboration platform, IT staff benefit too: “Chromebooks are the only thing I can deploy massively without adding staff, without adding resources, without a lot of preparation. It is so easy. We purchase them, we enroll them in our domain, and give them to schools.”

To the west, in Edmonton, Alberta, more than 96,000 students, staff, and teachers are using Chromebooks and Google Apps. Terry Korte coordinates Technology Integration Planning Services for Edmonton Public Schools, where dedicated labs have been replaced by class sets of Chromebooks. Students have access to the technology right in the classroom, and “they’re writing more, editing more, accepting feedback more. Google Apps is a real leveling force across our district.”

We’re excited about what educators in Canada are doing with Google technology and can’t wait to share more about their and others’ work with you throughout this school year.

To learn more about Chromebooks you can contact the Google Education Team through our website. Or learn from some educators: Scott Monahan and Jim Jamieson are Digital Literacy Resource Teachers for the York Region District School Board in Ontario. As part of their board's roll out of Google Apps for Education to over 120,000 users, the two have organized a “Google Camp” for more than 500 of their teachers next month; join their G+ community to get in on the conversation.

I wrote my first two lines of BASIC as a five year old, and I’ve loved programming ever since. These days I’m teaching my own kids to code, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how they could have that same simple experience while learning to program for the web.

A quick sprint with my design friend +Jeff Baxter led to a little experiment called Coder. It’s an open source tool that turns Raspberry Pi into a simple, tiny, personal web server and web-based development environment – just what you need for crafting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while you’re learning to code. Here’s a quick video that helps explain how it all works (and a huge shout out to our friends +Claire Stapleton and +Minji Hong who helped us with it):

We thought about all the stuff we could do to make Coder a more complete package, but we have a hunch that the sooner this gets into the open source and maker communities, the more we’ll learn about how it might be used. Hopefully, a few more folks will pitch in and help us make this even more accessible and helpful for new coders.

To learn more, visit goo.gl/coder, get a Pi, download Coder, and make something awesome.

Since Chrome launched in 2008, we’ve been experimenting with new ways to tell stories on the web using 3D graphics, immersive sound effects and more. In the last few years, the mobile web has also exploded, so we wanted to explore what kind of new interactions were possible using the latest technologies available on Chrome for Mobile.

“Just A Reflektor” is an interactive film directed by Vincent Morisset and featuring a new song from Arcade Fire. The film lets you cast a virtual projection on your computer screen by holding up your mobile device in front of your computer’s webcam. That way, you control all of the visual effects in the experience—not by moving a mouse on a screen, but by moving your phone or tablet through the physical space around you.

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The film’s heroine, Axelle, is revealed through a spotlight that moves in time with your mobile device.

In a later scene, a liquid effect is combined with a time delay, creating a video collage.

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About four minutes into the film, the “reflektor” is turned toward Axelle herself.

To explore the effects used in the film, see the technology page, where you can adjust a number of visual settings and create your own effects using a robust editor. You can also watch a behind-the-scenes video to learn about how the film was made. The code for the film and tech page is open source, so creative coders can download it and try it for themselves.

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The technology page lets you create, edit and share your own visual effects using footage from the film.

We hope this project inspires more filmmakers and visual artists to experiment with the latest features in Chrome. And for everyone else, we hope “Just A Reflektor” offers a new, exciting way to interact with the web.

For those that can’t make it to Toronto for TIFF, for the first time ever YouTube is bringing the Toronto International Film Festival experience online.

Starting September 7th, Short Cuts Canada will be screened on youtube.com/tiff within 24 hours following their Festival premiere. YouTube will be screening a selection of the more than thirty shorts from emerging and established Canadian filmmakers including films about intergalactic monkeys; a boy who dreams of being the next James Cameron; or a bachelorette night out gone bad, among others.

With a worldwide audience and easy distribution, YouTube is a growing destination for emerging and established filmmakers to showcase their entertaining new works. Working with TIFF, now everyone can view this entertaining, story driven content from anywhere - making the film festival experience more accessible. Festival film fans everywhere have enjoyed content from other YouTube supported festivals for several years, including Sundance, Venice, and Tribeca Film Festival etc. and now they can preview some of the greatest Canadian Shorts premiering at one of the most prestigious and influential film festivals at YouTube.com/tiff

Also - don’t forget to stay tuned to our Google Canada Twitter and Google Canada G+ page for updates on TIFF press conferences that will be streamed live from the festival on the YouTube.com/TIFF page and see your favourite actors and directors discuss their new films first hand.